Favorites November 5th 2022

San Diego, June 2022

Amazing Maps™ @amazingmap

Sunshine duration in hours per year. USA and Europe

I'm not sure I ever quite realized how much less sunshine Europe gets, it's an absolute miracle they can make solar work there.

Scientific American @sciam

Researchers observed bumble bees rolling wooden balls for seemingly no other reason than fun bit.ly/3EduIAh

Many of the responses to this are essentially 'aww, how cute, the bees are playing with balls', but it seems sorta tragic if bees have a complex inner life.

Bloomberg Opinion @opinion

China’s car exports rose over 50% in the first nine months of this year, shipping out over 2 million vehicles. This isn’t just western automakers using China as an export hub; homegrown brands are finding their footing on the world stage trib.al/skEBMFt

If you're wondering, it's electric cars, they're making a lot of electric cars in China.

Threads

• Thread summarizing an absolutely wild paper about how social media leads to political polarization. TL;DR: it's not filter bubbles! It's almost the exact opposite, on social media (especially twitter) we're exposed to the absolute craziest people on the other side of the political divide constantly. This leads to constant combative encounters. Filter bubbles are good maybe?

• Short thread about a report from Russian FSB that 15 million Russians have left the country. That would be 11% of the country